lamp
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Posts posted by lamp
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On 05/12/2021 at 18:25, Michael Sant said:
Hey @lamp do you have some screenshots in game of where it is being used? This is something that wouldn't necessarily be required as a feature request to get changed so I'd like to see where its happening and then can raise it internally for further discussion.
Ah, a screenshot might be tough because I can't force it to come up, but it's one of the Assistant Manager suggestions during games. In the same place where it will have advice like "Tell X to mark Y". Does that help?
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I'm not sure if this is still in FM22 but I've encountered it in all previous versions of the game. I don't mean to police how anyone wants to use language in their personal daily use but as someone who has been around suicide it's incredibly jarring to see it pop up in the game. It would be a really, really small change for the assistant manager to say something other than "It would be suicidal not to [do some tactical thing]". It's especially jarring to see it used so casually and unnecessarily, when it is a heavy topic and I suspect scarring for a lot of people. Again, it's one thing to broach the topic itself, another to see it used so lightly it becomes a figure of speech. And when it comes to sport, I think it would be good to avoid metaphors for violence, war, self-harm, mental illness (similarly, avoid "it would be crazy") and so on.
An easy change: "It would be folly"
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When a player is one yellow from a suspension it's often suggested to tell them to ease off tackles. This seems great, except that then permanently becomes part of their instructions in the tactic and half a season later you end up wondering why half the squad has this override.
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To add one small and tangential point to this: something teams routinely do is take a variety of corner plays (short, etc). If you don't want to run the same corner every single time, you have to go through an absurd amount of detailed effort, updating across all tactics and seasons as personnel changes. At this point I've simply given up: I'll never run a short corner and just have one main corner tactic, that I try to keep updated but of course a sub or B team throws that all out the window.
It would be better for there to be a fixed number of possible routines, where players are auto-selected based on their attributes unless you manually override one or two selections (i.e, Player A has to be near post).
Then, as manager, the Set Piece screen lets you check off anywhere from 3-6 (for example) corner types and then select how often you want to practice them and how often you want to use them in games. For example, let's say I install four corner plays, A B C D and focus on them in a even 25-25-25-25 split in training. However, C and D are gadget corners and so my gameplan will see them used in a ratio of 35-35-15-15. A similar thing for set piece defenses and free kicks.
Additionally, whenever the tactic setting has 'time wasting' on, teams should just automatically take short corners usually. And if it's near the end of a game while protecting a lead, almost always they will take it short and keep it near the flag. This is something that should be automatic for all teams, no need to figure out which dials and knobs to turn to make routine and logical things happen.
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A season is long. Mousewheel scrolling is slow. I rather don't like having to pan down eight months' worth of games just to check what the upcoming slate in March looks like. Likewise, if I move ahead or back in the calendar, the default calendar view should snap back to the current date.
Additionally, it would be helpful to have the schedule/calendar as a tab in the match prep screens, given how relevant the upcoming schedule is to team selection.
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Correct, but professionals lay their jobs on the line with far more uncertainty than users are presented with in-game. A scout at an EPL club can't pull up any of their top targets and compare their ratings in first touch, passing, and vision. They will have their impressions internally, and sometimes it will prove very wrong at least in terms of ability to play for that club's system or coach. The scouting that brought in Douglas Costa and Bouna Sarr for Bayern for example was a spectacular failure for the club and Sarr can't find playing time ahead of a youth team player they didn't know they could count on until after this summer's training. Arsenal bought Willian last summer after a very good season for Chelsea and it seriously did not work out, and now they're trying to offload him.
This kind of uncertainty that clubs visibly face is simply nowhere close to being replicated in-game. Take Willian for example, he was correctly rated and a good player for Chelsea in FM20. He was again a good player in FM21 and what else could the game possibly have shipped him as? The issue is there was no in-game mechanic to account for the volatility inherent in any transfer, and sometimes even in moving from one season to the next on the same team.
A useful way to model this could be for training camp and preseason to actually be consequential. By the end, youth players can make large strides in development while veterans (particularly new signings) can hit jumps or declines, which determines how useful they will be able to be for the team that season. These changes should be super visible and broadcast to the user, so that you know -- as a team's internal professionals do -- when a player has soaring, stagnating, or cratering stock. You've got to be able to buy a player that looks totally logical and then realize, oh sh---.
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FYI`the subs rules are listed on the match in the schedule page. Otherwise you have to go to the competition page, then menu Overview > Rules.
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It's just that player evaluation isn't in any sense unpredictable or a challenge. Either you're a decent club and basically see everything or you're a semi-pro club that doesn't have a scouting budget. Even with the youth intake players, the world-beaters come in with known star potential and fulfill it and everyone else peters out. That guy with 2.5 stars potential has zero chance to blossom, at least so far as I've noticed. But following clubs, their youth ranks are full of players who fans think can turn into something, and sometimes players come from nowhere.
I get that there's a distinction between ability and perceived ability, it just doesn't seem very meaningful. At least, this is only from my observation. I have had zero diamond-in-the-roughs, every single youth prospect who became a starter or a star, I knew it was going to happen the minute they showed up in youth intake. When it comes to buying players, again, there's not really any mystery: you basically know what you are getting with a veteran, barring injury.
There isn't a case of a player going on a hot streak and convincing a user to splurge and then they land on the team and coaches realize they got something far different from what they were expecting. From a gameplay standpoint, I think more uncertainty for the user would be good and spice things up.
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This gets at something which is very limiting in FM, which is that player development is very static. Players are either good or they're not; if they're good, play them and they will get there and if they're not, they're obviously a waste of time. Attribute masking is essentially pointless for a rich club with good scouts.
Internally, perhaps could take a look at how much PA/CA changes in the database over the seasons. In real life, players come out of nowhere and sometimes they also fall off (or make a later career comeback). This is something that doesn't feel well-modeled by FM.
Additionally I think what is presented to the user maybe shouldn't be PA/CA, but their own coaching staff's view of the player's abilities, ratings, and potential. This can be disconnected with actual CA and affects how well players can play under a certain staff. Significant changes to staff can unlock (or confine) a player's career, and vary what the user sees as player ratings wildly. We've all seen the clearly good player a coach doesn't rate for whatever reason and he requires a change of scenery to succeed.
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Second this. There are a few of these common actions that are buried under the same level of clicks / mouse menu navigation as very obscure ones. At least for me I frequently also load/save a team but would never click "Selection Advice" especially when it's already one of the emails.
Clear Team Selection is roughly the same amount of trouble to get to as Pick Rotated Squad with Slight Rotation. Don't know about the rest of you, I've never used any of those (I'd have to look over the squad by hand anyway after handing it to AI, it's less trouble to hand pick) or set pick guidelines, but clearing/loading/saving is a regular.
What I'd really like is three buttons next to Quick Pick: A, B, and Clear. A and B will load first and second selection choices per tactic (helpful if you run several different formations). You can add a dropdown to save the current modifications. After loading, if you've made any changes, the text changes to A* or B* and the dropdown arrow to save update appears. There should also be an Undo icon at the top, maybe to the left of A.
Under Quick Pick, the rest of the menu items can go there including Selection Advice if need be, but I wouldn't mind if the number of possible AI pick permutations there were trimmed a bit. Or maybe a dropdown radio button list of the different ones -- Best XI, Rotation, Youth -- that selects one of a few ways of Quick Picking and the button itself follows whatever option is active.
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An example of a good promise mechanic is the points target: get 9 points out of your next 5 league games, and you can measure the progress exactly.
Examples of vague promises are ones where you have no idea if you have made zero progress, half progress, or almost all of the progress: "improve the coaching staff", "improve the midfield", things of this nature. You might think improve the coaching staff means getting coaches with higher rating, but no -- it seems to have more to do with their reputation and with filling empty slots on the staff if there are any (even non-coaching staff like U18 physios possibly? Again, difficult to tell!) Also there's no feedback on whether pending transfers are going to be enough for a player or not -- or whether transfers already agreed upon factor in. For example, a new transfer Player X demands you improve the midfield, and a new midfield signing occurs before Player X lands on the roster and that seems to have no effect on the promise.
Once, I signed a player that I promised to make vice captain -- an empty slot at the time -- and then the calendar date for selecting team captains occurred one day before the new player landed on the roster. I was forced to pick another vice captain who threw a fit after the signing completed.
IMO it's better to simply take out all the mechanics that aren't fully thought through and tested along with all their corner cases, and also presented in a clear way to the user. I would suggest that a lot of factors (including random ones) can make a player content to stay or absolutely require to leave a club over time -- largely outside the scope of signing promises. As for situations where players want a stronger midfield than you currently have, or a better coaching staff etc, I suggest making those players completely uninterested in signing a contract with your team until the situation has already changed.
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^I think this is a bug. Fatigue doesn't work the same way in international, players get way more tired and don't recover as well between games. They also don't gain match sharpness nearly as fast.
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Another thought!
I'd like a game mode that is club-centric rather than career-centric around a fictional coach profile of your own making (which has its own place, for sure). But rather than build a good save and then dominate [whatever league] every single year in perpetuity (you'd be fired if not) I would like the idea of taking a club I'm a fan of through the highs and lows, firing their manager when it's not working out and replacing them with real -- or created, if you like -- candidates (who might have transfer requests, formation restrictions, the like).
This would be another way of allowing the game to model things realistically, because there is nothing realistic about monotonically marching towards the perpetual dominance required to not get fired in a long career. And it would translate a natural part of the fan experience to the game: deciding when the manager stays or goes. Think this would add a rich layer to the game.
By comparison, hiring/firing backroom staff is totally uninteresting. Not only is it just a bit of a chore, it's trivial. There is no such thing as getting a coach or a GM or a physio that doesn't work out, there's only upgrading and extending and finding ones with better ratings. Every single backroom/scout/medical staff could get taken out of the game and I'd barely miss it. On the other hand, keep a few: chief scout, GM, technical director, these kind of things -- and give them more sway over how a team is run, what players it has access to, so that sometimes even ones with good ratings need to be let go in order to change things up.
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Professional players who play on Wednesday shouldn't be dying (red) by halftime on Saturday. Players who play Sat, Sat, Wed shouldn't be at very high risk of injury for the next Saturday game (3 games in a 14 day period), especially if they only played a handful of minutes as a sub on one of those days. Between the underlying mechanism and the feedback to the user, this is far too much in a way that doesn't reflect reality.
And the outcome is that human users find a way around this, but in ways that hurt the gameplay experience. Almost every sub made is not tactical but because the field is full of players who ''are looking exhausted out there and have given their all" . Or you pull out the stops to sign a near-full strength second XI and then some, and rotate far more aggressively than any real team would (and without much penalty...I mean imagine Harry Kane being told to sit midweek Premier League games, or Erling Haaland not starting every game when healthy because he frequently looks jaded and in need of a rest). This isn't how football teams are managed. And the result is that the AI teams are handicapped, because they can't and won't do this at anywhere near the level a human can.
If anything, this effect has gotten more extreme compared to previous versions of the game. And in international competitions it's broken on top of that -- fatigue is far more extreme. (Why?...)
I'd suggest substantially removing fatigue as a factor on a game-by-game basis. Instead, work in some cumulative effects that kicks in to drop a player out of form after an extended run of games without break: for example, perhaps their match sharpness meter can go into overdrive above 100% and turn into a penalty, particularly after an international break full of minutes. And of course it needs to be based on minutes, not games played: a 5-minute runout should have no effect. But 90 minutes Saturday? They're back to 100% fitness by even Tuesday.
And the injury risk shouldn't be that tied to fatigue, either. Again: humans will keep their stars healthier than the AI can. The impactful injuries that happen to squads are a lot more random, across the board unavoidable. Yes, there's some real degree of overuse leading to injury but what you have now is a human-only carveout to lower the chance of bad effects that the AI cannot match. Realism is better modeled more randomly, more unavoidably, and no matter how many fitness coaches or physios you sign.
To compensate, player and locker harmony can be a lot more volatile. Your key players really need to be playing almost all the time and can more easily be unhappy if they're only in a regular rotation. Smaller AI squads won't have an issue, but human super squads should be impossible to sustain. And the transfer/loan market should become much harder to cheese. You can't just buy any player from any club if they're available and you have money, and you can't just sell off most decent players for value whenever you need to...or buy a massive loan army with no risk. Smaller squads and more consequence with each transfer in and out.
Anyway, that's my gripe/suggestion for the day. I want to be managing football games, not massaging my way around a set of game mechanics. And I can't even just do a house rule about not building an oversized squad because none of my players can consistently go Saturday-Wed-Saturday without looking dead on the field.
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Hi, is this a known issue? Do I just not know how to do something in the game, or is international simply not playable?
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One more thing to add, in case it helps: while the new quick substitution within the match is an FM21 feature, the other bug involving available subs running out too early has happened in at least FM20, maybe before.
And @dudek1makes a keen observation. Since undo doesn't break substitutions in game all the time, it probably does have something to do with timing, and therefore interaction with highlights or something like that.
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I don't know if I can reproduce this at the moment but I have run into this before. Perhaps related, I think there's some still unfixed bug involving undos while making substitutions. You can end up in a scenario where the game thinks more substitutions have been made than actually happened, and you run out of available subs early. For my side, it's happened while staying within tactics screen -- although the reason I do that now is that I thought there was also some sort of bug where the two different substitution mechanics didn't mix well together.
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Happens sometimes with Olympics at the start of a season, too, though that's more understandable. There should be a mechanism in place to prevent this. It seems like exactly the sort of bug SI can and should fix.
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The only workaround I can suggest is to negotiate that particular item out of the club vision every time it's suggested. A nice idea, but not fully baked as a game feature, and among several promise items that appear to be difficult/inscrutable/impossible to keep (try your luck with a player who wants the coaching team improved. It's doable...maybe. You'll find out after it's too late!)
I think this one, like those, is actually possible to keep. It's just hard to gauge and the expected user actions don't always translate with no feedback as to why or how far off you are.
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Brief: USA U23s announce roster prior to senior team selection and poach as much current senior USMNT talent as they can. This is the likes of Pulisic, Reyna, McKennie, Musah, Dest, etc. Subsequently I'm unable to restore them all to the senior national team.
If I notice right away [I didn't at first], I can restore a few of the players to the senior team. But once the U23 roster goes under 19 players, I can't. And of course, I can't manually or automatically add other players to the youth squads over which I have no control. Once a few more days pass, I can't move anyone at all because the youth rosters are already locked in. An unpleasant surprise, because the calendar would have suggested that it wasn't time to pay attention until the senior selection date.
It's a totally unplayable situation.
Detail: Think this happens in part because the game is frustratingly wedded to a calendar format. In 2021, USA U23s announce squad for Olympic Games North American Qualifying on March 13, followed by USA U20s squad announcement on March 15, followed by USA North American Nations League on March 17.
Really, the user experience should be that the relevant decision point which affects all rosters happens once, and the coach controls at least who is reserved for the senior squad and who is left in the pool for youth teams to pick up.
More to the point, it baffles me why the U23 coaches are allowed to pluck players out of the senior setup to begin with.
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That sounds like Arsenal to me, really! If the issue is money to spend in the opening transfer window...do well until January or in season 1 with what you have, and you will have quite the purse. Maybe it's not the easiest to do well, but it's also not hard. And a lot of young players with high potential, especially in attack. 4-2-3-1 / 4-3-3 seem suitable. I'm probably just biased.
I suppose Bayern had a sacking this season and are "rebuilding" their team, but maybe they are too good for consideration.
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I'm a novice so I don't really know how the game works, and I'm just curious. Why combine an IW or IF with an IWB? The instructions read like the inverted attackers tuck in up front to allow for overlapping fullbacks or wingbacks. With inverted wingbacks also tucking in as they move up the field, it seems like there's not any width to the formation, and all four players behind Lewandowski crowd into the center on the attack.
I also always thought a DLF role was for a strike partnership typically, so with just one striker it takes away a true center forward option. Lewy seems more like a poacher or a lead-the-line AF kind of guy, at least in Bayern's system? He also seems like a monster for crosses, and the team has I think good crossers.
As for replicating Bayern's current setup goes, have you considered trying Kimmich as the DM? Or in a double pivot (with Thiago, I think?), and Muller central in a 4-2-3-1. That formation always seems to work well in this game, though I understand it's not what you are really going for.
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[Suggestion] 'Suicidal' language
in Reviewed
Posted · Edited by lamp
A quick Google turned up a random site and this isn't a screenshot but it appears to be a collection of sample FM text from all the way back in 2009. I'll save the link and just copy paste the prompt:
Here's a screen I pulled from Reddit from FM21 that doesn't have the same wording, but I think it's another equivalent message that is randomly rotated. It's in "The Dugout".